Students burst out laughing.Even I find it funny, though a little unsettling at how much he seems to mean it.Perhaps I should tread more carefully with him and his moods.
“So,” I go on, “let’s pretend for a moment that the horseman is an evil spirit.What would be one way someone like me could disable such a spirit?”
And if the actual horseman could give Brom some real insight right now, that would be lovely.
“You would have to disable the source,” Brom says, surprising me, and I’m not sure if he just came up with that or if he knows something.
“The source?”I ask.“You mean—”
“Professor Crane?”one of the students says.
I squint at Brom, trying to figure him out, then look over at the student.They’re standing by the window along with a few others, staring outside.
“What is it?”I ask testily, wanting their full attention, wanting Brom to keep talking.
“There’s a woman standing on the roof of the cathedral,” Josephine says, staring at me with saucer-wide eyes.
“What?”I say, running off the platform and over to the window, putting my face close to the glass.Sure enough, on the top of the Gothic cathedral, in between two of the spires, is a girl.
Not just any girl though.She’s as thin as a beanpole, with long dark hair, and is dressed in a dirty white gown, torn at the seams.
She looks exactly like the girl I had seen dancing by the lake one night before the sisters came and took her away.
“That’s Lotte,” someone else says.“She was in my history class the first week of school and then never came back.”
Suddenly Kat is beside me and I move over to make room for her, Brom coming behind me.“Oh my God,” Kat whispers.“She’s going to jump.”
“Are you sure?”I ask her, and sure enough the girl starts looking over the edge and dangling one foot off it.
“Jesus,” I swear, and run out of the classroom and down the hall, bursting through the doors and outside.I hear all the students following me as we run into the light rain, yelling at the girl not to jump, and in seconds Brom is running beside me as we sprint across the wet lawn to the cathedral.
“Do we try and catch her?”he asks, legs pumping effortlessly with pure athleticism.
“We have to try something,” I say.“Lotte!”I yell up at the roof as we get closer, hoping that really is her name.“Stay where you are, don’t jump!”
But Lotte starts laughing.“Stay where I am?”she yells back.“And let them continue to eat me alive?We’re all just flies in a web.”
And then, before Brom and I can reach her, she throws her arms up in the air, as if she’s doing a ballerina spin, letting herself fall off the cathedral.I scream, running as if through a bad dream, watching as her body dances on the way down, before landing on the stone path with a sickening splat.
I stop dead in my tracks, unsure of what to do.
Flashbacks of Marie keep coming into my vision, mixing with the girl on the ground.
I see Marie’s head hitting the wooden floor in the living room, blood pooling around her like a cape of death.If the rug had been a few inches longer, she would have lived, it would have softened the blow.
But it hadn’t been longer, and Marie died.
I see Marie’s eyes staring up at the ceiling and watch as the light goes out of them.
I was screaming then, and I’m screaming now.
The girl lying on the stones, the blood slowly pooling out of the back of her head, the way her limbs are broken and splayed at unnatural angles—the girl blinks at the gray sky.
She isn’t dead, not yet.
It’s enough to make me move, stumble to my knees beside her.
“Lotte,” I say to her, my voice a quiver, placing my hand at her cheek.
